The 20 most exciting movies of spring 2025

Summer movie season is starting earlier and earlier every year, and this one is no exception. This spring has all kinds of exciting movies, and maybe even a few of the best and biggest movies of the year.

As you might expect, the biggest highlights are movies in the big franchises. The MCU is bringing out Thunderbolts* led by Florence Pugh and Sebastian Stan, while Tom Cruise is returning for what could be the (or at least his) last Mission: Impossible movie ever. Meanwhile, Disney is all in on live-action remakes, with Snow White and Lilo & Stitch due out in the next few months. Thankfully, there’s some exciting original movies coming too, like David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds or Ryan Coogler’s vampire horror movie Sinners.

To help you keep track of all the fantastic-looking movies that are on the way, we’ve made a list of the 20 best movies of spring 2025.

Release date: March 7
Director: Dave Needham
Cast: Mr. Lawrence, Jill Talley, Tom Kenny

SpongeBob’s best character finally gets her due. That’s right — even though this movie is called Plankton, it’s Karen, his computer wife, who rises up and decides to dump his lame ass and take over the world herself. Meanwhile, Plankton has to team up with SpongeBob and the rest of the heroes in order to win her back. —Petrana Radulovic

Release date: March 7
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Cast: Robert Pattinson, Steven Yeun, Mark Ruffalo

What’s better than one Robert Pattinson doing slapstick comedy with a funny voice? Two Robert Pattinsons! Well, at least two. Bong Joon-ho’s newest movie has Pattinson playing a worker in a capitalist sci-fi hellscape who’s signed up to test the limits of a new human colony and get cloned every time he dies. —PR

Release date: March 7
Director: Paul W.S. Anderson
Cast: Dave Bautista, Milla Jovovich, Arly Jover

The latest in a long series of #powercouplegoals collaborations between spouses Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich (the Resident Evil movies, 2020’s Monster Hunter, 2011’s The Three Musketeers), In the Lost Lands is billed as the first feature adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s work. Adapted from Martin’s 1982 short story, it’s a dark fantasy about an infamous witch (Jovovich) who hires a grizzled hunter (Dave Bautista) to help her track down a werewolf through a post-apocalyptic landscape ruled by a tyrannical overlord and an even more tyrannical church. Just your basic future-fantasy Western slash monster movie, with a heavy side order of Furiosa in the setting and characters. —Tasha Robinson

Release date: March 14
Director: Mark Anthony Green
Cast: Ayo Edebiri, John Malkovich, Juliette Lewis

The second of A24’s eight scheduled genre-spanning 2025 movies (after Parthenope in early February), Opus follows a dedicated but frequently sidelined music journalist (The Bear and Bottoms co-star Ayo Edebiri) to the secretive compound of a cultishly adored pop star (John Malkovich) who wants her to hear his first album in 30 years. Mark Anthony Green’s directorial debut, a horror-thriller about fame and power, got mixed reviews at Sundance, but the lead performers remain promising. —TR

The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie

Release date: March 14
Director: Pete Browngardt
Cast: Eric Bauza, Candi Milo, Peter MacNicol

Daffy Duck and Porky Pig team up to save the Earth from an alien invasion. But considering their big personalities and generally dysfunctional working relationship, they might just drive each other crazy before they can save anyone. Where’s Bugs? Who knows? But Petunia Pig is also here. —PR

Release date: March 14
Directors: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo
Cast: Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, Stanley Tucci

Once-and-future Avengers directors Anthony and Joe Russo are launching their new sprawling science fiction movie on Netflix: Loosely based on a 2018 novel from Swedish retrofuturist Simon Stålenhag (whose work also inspired the Tales from the Loop TV show, board game, TTRPG, etc.), The Electric State has a teenager (Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown) on a road trip to track down her missing brother via a robot (Anthony Mackie) he sent to find her. The twist: They’re living in a post-robot-apocalypse world where the robots have all been banned to a wasteland. Early looks at this one have a strong A.I. Artificial Intelligence feel, with a side order of Ready Player One and a whole lot of familiar names: Chris Pratt, Ke Huy Quan, Woody Harrelson, Jenny Slate, Giancarlo Esposito, and a lot more. —TR

Release date: March 21
Director: Marc Webb
Cast: Rachel Zegler, Gal Gadot, Andrew Burnap

It’s another Disney live-action remake! This one is full of… well, let’s just say that the CG dwarfs are a choice. And they did Rachel Zegler so damn dirty with that haircut and Party City-esque dress. But Zegler has pipes, and maybe the fact she looks and acts like a literal Disney Princess might be enough to save this one. —PR

Release date: March 21
Director: Flying Lotus
Cast: Eiza González, Aaron Paul, Iko Uwais

In space, no one can hear you say “Hey, where’d all my crewmates go?” Eiza González (3 Body Problem) stars as a woman who wakes up in a space station, her memory missing and her companions all dead. Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul co-stars as the ominous figure from her past who arrives to “help.” Directed and soundtracked by composer Flying Lotus (Kuso), this original science fiction thriller looks like a banger, hitting some discomfiting Alien vibes without being yet another derivative Alien movie. —TR

Release date: March 28
Director: Alex Scharfman
Cast: Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega, Will Poulter

A24’s new comedy horror fantasy is about the fallout of a man and his daughter hitting a unicorn with their car. The man’s pharmaceutical CEO boss immediately wants to exploit the unicorn’s magical properties. But if there’s one thing we should all take away from old legends, it’s that you should not fuck around with a magical animal with a spear on its head. —PR

Release date: March 28
Director: Jaume Collet-Serra
Cast: Danielle Deadwyler, Okwui Okpokwasili, Russell Hornsby

Prolific director Jaume Collet-Serra has his hits and misses: He was behind the virally popular Netflix thriller Carry-On, the excellent shark-attack movie The Shallows, and the startling horror film Orphan, but also the infamous superhero flop Black Adam. Here, he’s back with a mysterious Blumhouse movie that looks a bit like a creepypasta riff: A grieving woman (Danielle Deadwyler) and her family are haunted by a threatening apparition with an opaque warning. —TR

Release date: April 4
Director: Jared Hess
Cast: Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Emma Myers

The Minecraft movie is a little bit like Jumanji, but instead of being sucked into a jungle, the group of misfits gets pulled into the Minecraft world, where everything is cube-shaped and thrives on imagination. Also, Jack Black is here! So it is really like Jumanji. —PR

Release date: April 18
Director: David Midell
Cast: Al Pacino, Dan Stevens, Ashley Greene

It feels late in the game for a movie about an old priest (Al Pacino) and a young priest (Dan Stevens) facing a young woman who’s allegedly possessed by a demon. The twist in this case is that the young woman was inspired by Emma Schmidt, aka Anna Ecklund, a real-life woman whose alleged possession and monthslong exorcism in 1920s Iowa inspired several other horror movies. —TR

Release date: April 18
Director: Ryan Coogler
Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton

The exciting return of Ryan Coogler (Black Panther, Fruitvale Station) stars Michael B. Jordan and, well, Michael B. Jordan as a pair of twins menaced by a supernatural force in the 1930s. The initial trailer looks slick, confident, and hard-hitting — somewhere between a ghost story and a bootlegger crime thriller. But the marketing has deliberately kept most facts about the movie under wraps, leaving the real nature of the horror here thrillingly opaque. —TR

Release date: April 25
Director: David F. Sandberg
Cast: Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino, Odessa A’zion

The sort-of movie adaptation of the 2015 horror game Until Dawn puts a few new twists on the story, uniting some squabbling characters against an immediately obvious supernatural evil, and setting the story in a time loop, where different horrific monsters kill the characters every night, setting up a scenario where they have to out-think the setting and escape the loop before their 13th and final death. The execution looks a bit like 13 different iterations on The Cabin in the Woods, due to the proliferation of creepy creatures, the self-awareness of it all, and the sense of a trap closing on a pretty familiar cast of characters, but it remains to be seen whether Until Dawn the movie has any such sense of humor to it. —TR

Release date: April 25
Director: Isaiah Saxon
Cast: Helena Zengel, Finn Wolfhard, Willem Dafoe

In a remote village in the Carpathian mountains, humans fend off the monstrous ochi. But when a lonely girl discovers a baby ochi, she’s determined to return it to its family — and discovers that maybe these strange creatures aren’t as vicious as she was led to believe. —PR

Release date: April 25
Director: David Cronenberg
Cast: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce

David Cronenberg’s latest body-horror movie is a heavy one: It centers on a grieving CEO (Vincent Cassel) who invents a technology that lets people monitor their loved ones’ graves, using a phone app to watch their bodies decay in real time. When vandals destroy a cemetery featuring his technology — including desecrating his wife’s grave — he has to figure out who and why. —TR

Release date: May 2
Director: Jake Schreier
Cast: Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan, David Harbour

The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s answer to the Suicide Squad forces a group of reluctant antiheroes — including Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), and Red Guardian (David Harbour) — to team up for a mission. Will they get a chance at redemption? Or, more importantly, will the MCU? —PR

Final Destination Bloodlines

Release date: May 16
Directors: Zach Lipovsky, Adam Stein
Cast: Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Teo Briones, Richard Harmon

The sixth installment in the Final Destination series has been pitched as a bit of a soft reboot for the series, not that continuity has ever mattered in movies built around people who escape death in a freak accident, and are then stalked by death via increasingly unlikely accidents. This time around, the action kicks off with a college student having recurring nightmares about death. Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, directors of the underseen, extremely fun 2018 sci-fi thriller Freaks, take the wheel this time out. —TR

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

Release date: May 23
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Cast: Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg

Tom Cruise takes up where he left off with Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, back in 2023, still fighting a world-spanning, all-powerful AI via lots of dangerous stunts. Expect the mission to be possible, just barely. —TR

Release date: May 23
Director: Dean Fleischer Camp
Cast: Maia Kealoha, Chris Sanders, Sydney Agudong

Most of what we’ve seen of the live-action Lilo & Stitch hasn’t exactly been live action. But hey, at least Stitch is cute. We’ll have to see how Lilo, Nani, and the rest of the human cast, not to mention the other, weirder-looking aliens, translate to this style. —PR